


with the pill or demon as my body changes

by mysilenceknot



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-09 21:46:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5556632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysilenceknot/pseuds/mysilenceknot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barry helps Cisco work through an unexpected side effect of PTSD.</p>
            </blockquote>





	with the pill or demon as my body changes

**Author's Note:**

> For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of taking organic chemistry, here's [an image of a standard cyclohexane ring and also two cyclohexane chairs](http://gallery.mailchimp.com/309c64a722917b799ec47b03a/files/chair1.png). Here's essentially [the chalkboard set-up](http://swe.caltech.edu/photos/2013_ScienceOH/1.jpg) that's described in the story. Title comes from [I Want to be Well](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO17WyaU2mE) by Sufjan Stevens.

Star Labs had a conference room that reminded Barry of his favorite lecture hall back at college. This wasn’t because of it’s capacity, fifteen rows of tables in three sections that spread out wide and stretched up so the room itself was two stories high. It also wasn’t because of how well someone at the bottom could be heard, as if they were standing on an auditorium stage. What Barry had loved about both the classroom he’d learned organic chemistry in and this conference room was the chalkboard set up. 

When one walked in it appeared that there were simply three standard chalkboards on the main wall. In reality, hidden behind each of those chalkboards were two more chalkboards, and as someone spoke they’d push the filled board up and another blank board would be awaiting them. Barry’s orgo professor had used the boards and color coordinated chalk with such ease, it’d made the entire experience (which, admittedly, would have probably still been enjoyable in a more standard classroom setting) even more enthralling.

And sure, in the age of interactive whiteboards it was a bit outdated for a research facility to have a room that required chalk instead of Expo Markers. However, Barry found the entire set up rather comforting. 

(He’d once had a convo with Cisco about how nice the slight roughness of a chalkboard could be in comparison to the easy glide of a whiteboard. Caitlin sat back with Iris and judged them both.)

Never in his wildest dreams would Barry have imagined seeing the Star Labs conference room used the way Dr. Langley had used them six years earlier. And yet, Barry walked in through the back of the conference room one afternoon and saw chalkboards full of... hexagons. 

Cisco was standing at the front of the room, frantically drawing across the boards hexagon after hexagon as if his life depended on it. As Barry got closer his confusion cleared up slightly; Cisco was drawing cyclohexane rings. He seemed to switch colors depending on what type of representation he was drawing - standard hexagonal rings were white but cyclohexane chairs were blue. Other colors were scattered around the boards depending on how the lines were attached to the shapes. There were no words on any of the boards.

Barry stood back and watched Cisco continue to work for a few minutes, puzzled. “Cisco?” he finally said, stepping forward so that they were only a couple feet apart.

Cisco jumped, his body twisting back and hitting the chalkboard as he crushed the white piece of chalk in his fist. “Augh!”

“Whoa, sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you!” Barry put his hands up and stretched out his arms in a defensive stance. “I thought you heard me.”

“Sorry, my bad. I was a little distracted.” Cisco laughed nervously, running a shaking, chalk-coated hand through his hair. Barry took note of the absurd amount of chalk powder covering Cisco - from the prominent white streaks in the left side of his hair to the blue smudges on his forehead to multicolored hand prints on his jeans - and tried not to laugh himself.

“So what is this, exactly? Other than a lesson on conformational isomerism.”

“I’m training myself.”

“...for?”

Cisco sighed and closed his eyes. “I’m training my hands because I can’t draw things correctly anymore and I figured if I practice more often, it’ll come back to me.”

Oh. Barry blinked. He turned away from his boyfriend and stared up at the seven filled boards containing hexagons of a variety of sizes. “How long have you been doing this?”

“...for at least half an hour every other day for the past three weeks?”

“Okay. How long have you been in here today?”

Cisco was quiet next to him. Barry waited.

“Two hours.”

“ _Cisco._ ”

“It’s not just molecular representations that are the problem, okay? It’s _everything_ and it’s frustrating to try to sketch an idea for new tech and having sweeping stray lines everywhere because my hands aren’t listening to my mind anymore.”

At the clipped tone in Cisco’s voice Barry turned back to look at him. His body was tense in defense and his eyes were beginning to shine. “Sometimes the letter U looks identical to the letter V and I’ve started writing lowercase Ns that look more like my lowercase H. My handwriting hasn’t changed since I was a freshman in college but it’s changing again now for the worse and I just.” He blinked twice and took a deep breath. “I want to train myself to be better so that I don’t get mad every time I try to do something more complex than writing my name.”

Barry was silent for a few moments as he processed what he’d seen and heard. He had noticed that in the last few months Cisco’s schematics contained more scratched out images than they previously had, but he didn’t think much of it. And past one memorable night where Cisco had thrown an entire pad of paper in the trash before deciding he’d be better off going to bed, there hadn’t been any obvious signs of how much he was bothered by this change in his writing ability.

“Were you aware that bad handwriting is a symptom?”

“What?”

“It’s a PTSD symptom.” Barry shrugged. “It’s not recorded in the DSM-5 but. It’s a symptom.”

Cisco’s frown deepened; his posture relaxed slightly. Barry reached out and grasped Cisco’s right hand between the two of his. He massaged it carefully.

“It was either my third therapist or my fourth one who connected how sloppy my handwriting had gotten with the state of my brain but she definitely was the only one who ever said anything,” Barry explained.

“Any theories behind it?”

“The only one I’ve seen is that the fine motor skills generally deteriorate when we’re anxious. So logically what follows is --”

“-- a general decrease in fine motor skills when you’re living with an anxiety disorder. Awesome.” His voice cracked.

“Hey,” Barry said, “it’s okay.” He let go of Cisco’s hand with his right hand and gently pushed Cisco’s chin up so they were looking at each other. Tears had slowly begun sliding down his boyfriend’s face; he felt his heart drop. “ _Darling_.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for. It sucks.”

"Did it ever go away?”

“Not really,” he admitted, cupping Cisco’s face and brushing away the tears on the left side of his face with his thumb.

“Figures.” Cisco’s face scrunched up, his eyes clenching even tighter as if to keep tears from continuing to flow. “And my handwriting hasn’t gotten consistently better with this practice but I didn’t want to believe that there was something wrong. I don’t know.”

“Hey. Look at me?” Barry asked. Cisco opened his eyes, tears still falling. Barry brought their joined hands up to the other side of his face. “The writing issue still comes and goes and I know it’s frustrating, but it gets easier.”

“I don’t want it to get easier, I want it to stop.”

“I know. I get that.”

“I thought I was going crazy,” he gasped.

“Your brain is overloaded and doing the best it can under the circumstances.”

It’d taken them a while before Cisco was able to be vulnerable in front of Barry without being at the edge of a total meltdown. As much as Barry had wished Cisco had brought up his writing anxiety instead of letting Barry discover it, he also understood that Cisco was practiced at deflecting out of fear. Add having PTSD, an anxiety disorder linked tightly with avoidance, and conversations about mental health outside of the nightmares and flashbacks weren’t likely to happen.

They stood together, foreheads touching, until Cisco’s breath settled down and his tears stopped. Barry let go of his face and kissed him softly, hands settling at his waist. Cisco’s hands reached out and clenched his cardigan.

“I’m sorry,” Barry said as he pulled away. “There are a lot of weird things that you discover as you go through it that books and doctors don’t warn you about.”

“Yeah,” Cisco sighed.

“But I’ve been there. Hell, we both know I’m _still_ there. So I know it isn’t easy and I won’t have the answers for everything but I promise I’ll help you navigate through this as much as I can.”

“I know.” Cisco leaned forward to initiate another kiss. “I know you’re here and I love you for it.”

Barry smiled. “So. The chalkboards.”

“Right.” The pair turned their heads sightly to stare at Cisco’s work.

“Was the repetitiveness helping at all?” Barry asked.

“It was kind of calming when I wasn’t going overboard.”

“Did you ever draw things other than cyclohexane?”

“Sometimes I drew Newman projections but I’d also move away from orgo and draw circuits or write poetry I’d committed to memory. I once spent an hour writing integrals that I didn’t bother solving.”

“You’re just a jack of all trades, aren’t you,” Barry laughed, turning back to see Cisco slowly smile.

“I try,” he said. “So I’ll practice on my writing but I’ll do it less...frantically.”

“That sounds good. One thing that helped me when I was younger was not worrying about inconsistencies in letter size. Because focusing on something like that instead of letting your hand move ends up stressing you out, and the only people who are going to see your notes are everyone else on the team. And none of us are judging your writing.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s what I’m here for.” Barry grabbed Cisco’s hand once more. “Life advice and to make you dinner. Or we can order takeout.”

“Takeout sounds good,” Cisco said as the pair left the conference room.

“ _Wow_ , rude.”

**Author's Note:**

> My therapist never told me about the handwriting thing - I figured it out through google searches and asking my other friends with PTSD because seriously, there are so many Symptoms that pop up to bite you in the butt when you least expect them. Also I believe that Cisco never ~officially~ got diagnosed but I'm firmly pro self-diagnosis. Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
